How often should prelink run ?

Hannes Mayer h.mayer at inode.at
Wed Jun 23 17:50:34 UTC 2004


Hi Jakub!

Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 07:13:26PM +0200, Hannes Mayer wrote:
> 
>>Hi all!
>>
>>I know that prelink'ing is for gathering information about
>>shared libraries and causes stuff to start faster.
>>
>>What I have missed so far is how often it should run ?
>>
>>Is it really necessary for a daily prelink via cron ?
>>
>>Prelink causes heavy disk activity and CPU utilization on my
>>machine. I suppose it's sufficent to run it only if I have
>>updated/installed stuff, right ?
> 
> 
> Is it really prelink and not updatedb?

Yep, it is ... I checked "top"
I already disabled updatedb for the same reason (HD activity). Now I run
it manually every now and then (usually when I can't find a newly created file,
but that happens not often. I usually remember my system quite well :-)

> The daily prelink job runs in a quick mode, which essentially means
> it just stats the 2000 binaries/libraries or how many you have and if nothing
> changed since last prelinking, doesn't do much more.

Well, todays prelink job was done in about 2-3 minutes, but CPU went to 97%
(quite a long time for ld-linux.so.2) and due my older and thermically problematic
machine the CPU temp rises to over 60C, so I try to avoid any unneeded high temps.
It's enough when the temp goes that high when I compile stuff.

> Of course, if you don't change things very often on your box, you can
> choose to run it less often.

I've read in the man page of prelink that if a library is not "in prelink", it
doesn't hurt, right ?

Thanks a lot,
Hannes.








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